800g, £10.99This looks great with its grooved icing, jaunty little extra "branch" and flourish of holly. "It tastes like real cake!" is the response from the children tasters, and it does. Not as dark as the Waitrose version, but the icing is gorgeously thick and buttery and the cake, lighter and more milk-chocolatey in hue and flavour, is excellent. You could easily mistake this for home-made.★★★★

£5.99 eachThis one tastes like it was baked by an actual person rather than simply manufactured. You can really taste the dark belgian chocolate, the ganache is pleasingly bitter and the cake moist, dense and almost as dark as the frosting. Rolled round plenty of extra ganache inside, it squidges pleasingly at the touch of a knife. A winner and, with the Abel and Cole log, my joint favourite.★★★★

£7 eachBlimey – Asda gives it the full bling. A celebration-sized log, with branch almost as big as the main cake, it's weighted down with copper-coloured biscuit balls, chocolate holly leaves and curls of marbled chocolate. The thick, rich ganache is good, but the buttercream-rolled cake itself is a little dry, and there's no way it needs its chocolate coating underneath the icing. There's also a slightly artificial aftertaste. ★★★

M&S chocolate log

PR

£4.99 eachMoist sponge with thick, buttery chocolate frosting, both tasting of real chocolate. Not too sickly – I could just about contemplate eating more than one slice. Just enough icing. It could do with a little more luxuriousness and there's still a certain powderiness of sponge, but a solid, workaday rather than celebration effort.★★

Sainsbury's chocolate swiss roll and yule log decorating kit

PR

£3.79 eachThis is dry, powdery-tasting and over-sweet. Like a giant dusty miniroll. When accessorised with the Yule Log icing kit, it became too sickly even for my sugar-addict daughter – the chocolate coating plus butter icing adds up to total overkill. Ingredients are a carnival of humectants and emulsifiers. Seems only distantly related to cake. Ugh.No stars